Zabriskie Point is a 1970 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. It presents a countercultural perspective on the state of America during the late 1960s and remains a cultural touchstone of that turbulent era. The film features Mark Frechette as an aimless young man named Mark who becomes embroiled in anti-establishment politics and, after an altercation with police at a student demonstration, goes on the run across the California desert. Daria Halprin plays an anthropology student named Daria who finds herself at odds with both Mark's anti-capitalist crusade and the ruthless developer who hires her to survey a tract of land in the desert.
As the film progresses, Antonioni uses the desert as a symbol of existential void, an undifferentiated terrain indifferent to human activity. Meanwhile, Mark and Daria develop a deepening emotional connection, even as they remain committed to their separate causes. The film culminates in a visually stunning montage sequence set to the Pink Floyd song "Careful with That Axe, Eugene," in which Mark envisions a fantasy destruction of commercial and military structures that ends with a transcendent explosion of color.
Zabriskie Point was Antonioni's first English-language film, and he captures the atmosphere of a youth subculture that was both decadent and exhilirating, often with long takes and an elliptical, non-linear narrative style. Though it was not initially well-received by American audiences or critics, it has since come to be regarded as a classic of 1970s cinema.